Saturday, February 28, 2009

More again!

Okay, here's an animated version with the previously missing frame and some adjustments to frames 2 and 14. I saved a 24 fps one (I think that's what it's supposed to be) and a 12 fps version so you can actually see what's going on. The 24 fps looks really frantic.24 FPS12 FPS

Does anyone know of a more efficient way of uploading these things? Should I make them into smallish .movs? Upload them to Youtube or Vimeo?

Anyway, thoughts:

The extreme on the left arm seems to jerk a little. It's preceded by some choppiness of the hand-- like it switches angles too many times in too awkward of ways in a really small amount of time. I see now why the original had sort of soft, bendy hands on those frames.

Some things shift shape/size (the beak, even with perspective and all that tilting taken into consideration, seems to change its proportions)

I think the jerking comes from when he shifts weight (and consequently the line of action snaps)-- it doesn't flow gracefully at all once he recovers from the step

The tail feathers have no idea what shape they are. I think it's because of weird inbetweening in the original animation. I was being conservative in terms of following the original because I know I'm new to it. I know part of the shifting is because they're moving back and forth into space away from the viewer, but it doesn't feel as sensible as it should. Should I take more liberties next time? They also shift length but that's my fault.

Also related to blind fidelity to the original-- the eyelids go down a little. I wasn't sure exactly why-- he doesn't fully blink. They just sort of go down with the step, like they have to catch up with his head when it pulls up. I kind of liked that notion so I stuck with it, but I don't know if I pulled it off. I also thought the pupils shifted around a lot in the original and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Again, should I try to keep it more consistent next time or trust the decisions the original artists made?

I like the feet and far hand most. Making sure I paid attention not to tone down the feet was a decent success. The far hand stays pretty solid.

Either way, an awesome exercise. Doing so many construction drawings one after another really got me into the swing of things. Little weird a-ha moments are more and more frequent. It's like staring at a magic eye and totally getting it for fleeting moments at a time, but not being able to cross my eyes hard enough to get it to stick. Or something.

If I could get a critique, some advice, etc., I'd appreciate it a lot! I think I wanna study another walk before I try making my own.

This is a Study Blog

This blog is devoted to STUDIES of the traditional cartoon. Most ideas on here are not mine (characters, poses, etc.)-- this is a blog about learning new things about classic cartooning. While I am proud of my work posted here, I can't take credit for the ideas.

I owe a lot to my mentor, John K. He is a great teacher, and many of these studies also use his drawings as a starting point.